A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [50]
“You’re not alone in that,” said Jerome. “Once, I thought about old, decaying fences for an entire year. And then, there are other times when I think about absolutely nothing … nothing at all. I hate it when someone asks what’s going on in my mind. Often, quite often in fact, it’s a blank slate.”
“A blank slate,” Sylvia repeated and looked around the room. “But my own strangeness, I think, is that perhaps I have lived too long in the same place, too long in the same house, thinking about sofas no one sits on, cupboards no one opens filled with silver and china and linen no one ever uses. Any more. There are also Bibles no one reads and ancient photo albums no one ever looks at, old letters no one ever glances at. Except for me, of course, except for me. It is as if I were an extinct species mysteriously catapulted into the beginning of the twenty-first century out of a childhood where boys stood on the burning deck when all but they had fled and captains lashed their daughters to the masts of sinking ships.”
“ ‘The boy stood on the burning deck when all but he had fled,’ ” Jerome said quietly. He turned to Sylvia. “I haven’t a clue how I came to know that.”
“Could you have learned it at school?”
“Doubtful.”
“They don’t memorize poems in school any more, then.” Sylvia had been particularly good at memory work. When called upon, however, she had been unable to rise to her feet, unable to recite the required lines.
“Not in the school I went to,” said Jerome.
“In the beginning, at least, we seemed so alike, Andrew and I, so much a part of the same vanishing species with our pioneer ancestors and a shared focus that drifted to the past. He often stood on burning decks of one kind or another when all but he had fled. And I … I seemed to be constantly lashed to the mast by those who had, for my own safety—or was it for theirs?—tied me there.”
Jerome, Sylvia noted now, had leaned back against the arm of the couch and had lit a cigarette. “Don’t tell Mira,” he said. “She thinks I’ve quit.” Smoke rose from his hand, then twisted in the air above him. “ Well, at least you know something about your past. Not much of that in my life. In fact I know next to nothing about my family’s past.”
“Oh yes,” said Sylvia. “I know about the past, all about the past. I can list from memory the entire genealogy of my father’s family and have been able to do so since I was six, seven years old: also, the townships of my County, backwards and forwards, in rapid succession.” She smiled, remembering. “I can tell you the names of all the constellations and I can relate their exact distance from Earth. I can tell you where each Georgian house in the County is situated and I can describe what it looked like when it was in its prime—what was cultivated in its flower beds and vegetable gardens, whether the clapboard was painted, where the original log house was placed, when the magnificent barns were built, the full name of the earliest settler and that of his wife, and how many of his children died during the first winter, and where they are buried.
“I can describe each line on Andrew’s face, the one brown eye that is fractionally larger than the other, the dip of his temples and the smooth, moist creases of his eyelids. The way his hair changed from light brownish grey to white before my own eyes, how when it is brushed back the growth pattern of this hair reveals an uneven widow’s peak. I can describe this the way a child describes a set of facts given to him in school, but now there are times when I can’t visualize anything at all about Andrew’s face.”
His hands had been soft, not the hands of a labourer. There had been a place on his leg where the thigh muscle eased like a beach onto the hard bone of the knee. There was a particular vein that stood out on his forehead, and a small oval-shaped birthmark on the back of his neck. Sylvia knew all this and yet, when she closed her eyes, she could not see him.
“But, you